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Top 10 ecommerce SEO tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most critical factors for any eCommerce website, of course we can build you the “Selfridges” of websites, but this won’t guarantee you a place on Oxford Street! We have listed some tips you can use to help your Magento Ecommercewebsite climb the Google ranks and outshine your competitors.

1. Simple URL’s: You should change your products and category URL’s to include names rather than dynamic ID’s, Magento allows you to specify each URL on the product and category “general” tab.

2. Unique Keyword Meta tags: Your meta title and description is one of the fist things a search engine will read when crawling your website, therefore make sure your meta title has your prominent keyword ONCE at the start, and the full title is between 30 – 50 characters. Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters and briefly describe your page content whilst mentioning you keyword just once. Magento allows you to set meta data for each page using the meta tab in each product, CMS page and category editor.

3. Original Content: One of Google’s main focuses, since the launch of Panda, is fresh original content, think about it, if Google has the choice of a site with content updated daily or one which updates once in month, which site do you think is the more relevant? Talk about your products and services openly in an informative and educational manner, this is NOT another chance to promote your sale!

4. Product Reviews: We often install “Review Booster” to a number of our ecommerce stores, this emails the customer a few days after their purchase and offers them a returning discount code if they complete a quick review. You get a review, you often make another sale and the customer gets money off. Win Win Win.

5. Google Shopping: Google shopping is another free tool to utilise and allows your products, images and prices to feature on Google’s shopping pages. Your Magento ecommerce store can list all your products in just a few clicks and monitors it’s performance with it’s syncing function.

6. Visible Content: Google can now see where you’ve hidden content on the page, so if you’ve sacrificed text to show off images, or hidden text behind “read more” buttons this should now be reverted. Ideally you need 500 words of content on your landing page to get Googlebot excited!

7. Image Optimization: Site speed has always been important, but Google now adds more weight to this and your speed is quite often reflective in your Google ranking. Why not optimise images, specially large banner images, these should be around 100 – 200kb at the most.

8. H1 Tags: Many stores make the mistake of adding their H1 tag to the logo or home page image. Google tends to read your site in this order, meta title, meta description, H1 tag, site content, therefore you should make you H1 tag your site strap-line which again should contain your primary keyword.

9. 301 redirects: If you’re a long standing business and you have a number of inbound links, should you change your product location, URL or no longer stock and item, simply update you htacess file to inform search engines and links pointing to your site of their new location. In the case of a product you no longer stock, why not redirect to something similar or the main category.

10. Site Map: Magento automatically generates and submits your sitemap to Google, but if you make important site changes why not regenerate the the sitemap and submit this via webmaster tools to keep Google informed and your pages indexed quicker.

If you require more help with SEO and your Magento ecommerce store, why not get in contact so we can scan your site and give you a full report on items that need addressing.